Heroes Work Herr
It is amazing all the things our tax dollars are funding... right? On a regular basis, earnings are siphoned from our paychecks to help pay for many government entities such as the NC Courthouse, Emergency Management, Health and Human Services and Public Instruction as well as 172 more agencies.
Then, there's your local property tax which supplements teacher pay, maybe supports a few needs in the classroom, acquisition of land for parks, recreational programming ... and many more local agencies .
Then, there's government bonds. These are corporate media and nonprofit campaigns directed toward voters to entice them to check the box on their ballots, indicating their desire to spend more of their own money on government projects.
“Death, taxes and childbirth! There's never any convenient time for any of them.”― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind.
What happens when your earnings begin to work against you? It seems as though anyone paying attention was able to get a sneak peak into public school classrooms this past year due to the increase in virtual online settings. What did we see??
Community members -many who need to remain anonymous - slip information to me about internal school happenings as they see problems arising in those settings .
Why, remember, just last fall I shared how the NC Office of Charter Schools collaborated with a controversial vendor, training Public Charter School Grantees about a variety of controversial topics in a video session. That presentation encompassed several questionable slides, to which the NC DPI staffer failed to respond to, when prompted..
No worries! According to Dave Machado, the Director of the Office Of Charter Schools, this vendor contract was terminated and he went out of his way, "to call me personally" to let me know this information. He refused to send documentation, as requested however.
Enough about NC state government. How about the County Government? Are they being good stewards of your tax dollars, as they frequently claim to be? That depends.
Meet Michelle Henderson, a drama teacher at Wake Forest Middle School and board member at Safe Schools NC.
What is Safe Schools NC? Apparently, it is a fantastic place to brush up on the right language to use when you meet a transgender student.
Apparently some Wake County Public School teachers intend to build so much stinkin' trust with children -as they have been tweeting about for years- they're manipulating commonly used terms in our homes such as, "mom, dad, grandma and grandpa." They replace those terms with ones they deem as better suited like, "parental unit, guardian, or adult at home."
Imagine paying someone to drive a wedge between hard working parents of Wake County and their impressionable teenagers.
Tax dollars funnel into nonprofits which love to find advocates willing to push their agenda forward, as it seems one has found in Mrs. H.
In trainings like this, education leaders, administrators, teachers, staffers, parents and students are not wrong to feel unpleased with Mrs. H's divisive presentation. For a public school teacher to consider invading a private, family home with attempts to alter their norms is not what I would imagine when I see "heroes work here" on signs planted around our public school entryways. Imagine having your mind changed before you ever left your home, perhaps unknowingly, without consent by someone you never even invited in. Instead of accepting what seems like constant and intentional disruptions coming from government school employees, why don't families turn the tables? Marx and Engels might still argue, "they have a world to win" [back]. 1
Mrs. H may not have any ill-intent, but it might be useful for community members to remind activist teachers to leave newspeak at the door before they walk into school buildings.
1. Marx and Engels, "The Communist Manifesto," 1948, 44.